‘Shortly after Christmas in 2009, a young woman from Somalia flew into Stansted and claimed asylum. She had just turned 18. As later accepted by the Home Office, she had experienced severe depredations in her home country. This included her rape at the age of six in the presence of her disabled mother, and the murder of both of her parents. She fled Somalia in 2008, initially to Yemen, where she spent the next year. She was eventually able to fly to Europe with the help of an agent, who provided a British passport to facilitate her entry into the UK.’

‘The defendant. a Ghanaian national, held a non-European Union passport. His wife, also a Ghanaian national, assumed the identity of a deceased Ghanaian national, who had had Dutch citizenship, and obtained a Dutch identification card and a Dutch passport under that false identity. The defendant and his wife had an infant daughter. On the false premise that he and the daughter were entitled to reside in the United Kingdom by virtue of his wife’s falsely assumed status as a European Union national, the defendant obtained residence cards, each in the form of a Home Office stamp in a non-European Union passport, for himself and the daughter. On three occasions the defendant used his passport, containing the residence card stamp, to enter the United Kingdom, and on one occasion he used it to open a bank account in there. The defendant and his wife were charged with various immigration and documentation offences. The defendant pleaded guilty to eight counts, charged as follows: (i) seeking or obtaining leave to enter or remain in the UK by the deception of applying to the Home Office for a residence card for himself (count 2) and for a certificate of naturalisation (count 12), contrary to section 24A(1)(a) of the Immigration Act 1971; (ii) facilitating the commission of a breach of section 10(1)(c) of the “Immigration Act 1999” by obtaining leave for his daughter to enter or remain in the UK by the deception of applying to the Home Office for a residence card for her, contrary to section 25(1) of the 1971 Act (count 3); (iii) possessing false identity documents with intent, contrary to section 25(1) of the Identity Cards Act 2006 (counts 4 to 7); and (iv) being in possession or control with intent of an identity document, namely a British passport in his own name that he knew or believed to have been improperly obtained in February 2012, contrary to section 4 of the Identity Documents Act 2010 (count 13).’

‘Abdurraouf Eshati, aged 29, from Wrexham was sentenced for terrorism and immigration offences today at the Old Bailey, Eshati received a six year prison sentence after he pleaded guilty yesterday at court.’

“Where the questions of whether an asylum seeker had come to the United Kingdom directly from a country where his life had been threatened after staying in Italy for a few days and whether he had made a claim for asylum as soon as reasonably practicable in the United Kingdom had not been fully investigated by immigration control after false identity documents were presented, the defence under section 31 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 should have been made available to him and the facts were for the jury to decide.”

“Where a defendant sought to rely on the defence of ‘reasonable excuse’ for the purposes of the offence of possessing a false identity document, contrary to section 25(5) of the Identity Cards Act 2006, the fact that the defendant did not know or believe that the document was false was not of itself a reasonable excuse. However, a defendant was entitled to ask the jury to consider objectively whether he had a reasonable excuse for possessing the material, and the fact that he did not know or believe that it was a false document, because of the circumstances in which it had been obtained, might well have a bearing on that question.”

“Eight members of an organised crime group have been sent to jail for more than 24 years for their part in large scale identity fraud and money laundering which resulted in the loss of millions of pounds.”

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